Apocalypse Vs. Reality

            As Elaine Pagel writes people read their own “social, political, and religious conflicts” into apocalyptic myths. Filmmakers love to create disaster movies showing wide scale societal devastation based on cultural and societal fears.

The Day After Tomorrow is an archetypical apocalyptic myth. It shows a total societal rearrangement caused by a large-scale catastrophe. Like all apocalyptic myths, the date it occurs is not specified, but still immediate enough to create a sense of concern. That allows it to take a slightly prophetic tone. The science behind the film is absolutely nonsensical, but the filmmakers clearly see climate change as an issue of concern. They just don’t want to let facts get in the way of a good story.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth film serves as a much more direct, prophetic, apocalyptic statement. Rather than allowing getting carried away with the spectacle, Al Gore relies on facts to show the realities of climate change. His predictions are nowhere near as drastic as the ones in The Day After Tomorrow. But they allow the audience no illusions. His message is climate change is happening, and there is nothing you can do about it.

These films base themselves around a similar cultural fear: global warming. But The Day After Tomorrow made $652 million dollars, while An Inconvenient Truth made about $50 million. That shows that in our society, we are more comfortable with myth than fact. The Day After Tomorrow takes society’s fears about global warming and exaggerates them to a point where they look like something out of The Book of Revelations. An Inconvenient Truth is much more jarring and uncomfortable, because it shows global warming as a fact, rather than a myth. Both films warn of an apocalypse by similar means, but audiences are more comfortable with that warning when it’s wrapped in a layer of myth, rather than fact.